This invention relates to nonvolatile memory systems and to methods of operating nonvolatile memory systems.
Nonvolatile memory systems are used in various applications. Some nonvolatile memory systems are embedded in a larger system such as a personal computer. Other nonvolatile memory systems are removably connected to a host system and may be interchanged between different host systems. Examples of such removable memory systems include memory cards and USB flash drives. Electronic circuit cards, including non-volatile memory cards, have been commercially implemented according to a number of well-known standards. Memory cards are used with personal computers, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), digital still cameras, digital movie cameras, portable audio players and other host electronic devices for the storage of large amounts of data. Such cards usually contain a re-programmable non-volatile semiconductor memory cell array along with a controller that controls and supports operation of the memory cell array and interfaces with a host to which the card is connected. Several of the same type of card may be interchanged in a host card slot designed to accept that type of card. However, the development of the many electronic card standards has created different types of cards that are incompatible with each other in various degrees. A card made according to one standard is usually not useable with a host designed to operate with a card of another standard. Memory card standards include PC Card, CompactFlash™ card (CF™ card), SmartMedia™ card, MultiMediaCard (MMC™), Secure Digital (SD) card, a miniSD™ M card, Subscriber Identity Module (SIM), Memory Stick™, Memory Stick Duo card and microSD/TransFlash™ memory module standards. There are several USB flash drive products commercially available from SanDisk Corporation under its trademark “Cruzer®.” USB flash drives are typically larger and shaped differently than the memory cards described above.
Data stored in a nonvolatile memory system may contain erroneous bits when data is read. Traditional ways to reconstruct corrupted data include the application of Error Correction Codes (ECCs). Simple Error Correction Codes encode data by storing additional parity bits, which set the parity of groups of bits to a required logical value, when the data is written into the memory system. If during storage the data is erroneous, the parity of groups of bits may change. Upon reading the data from the memory system, the parity of the group of the bits is computed once again by the ECC. Because of the data corruption the computed parity may not match the required parity condition, and the ECC may detect the corruption.
ECCs can have at least two functions: error detection and error correction. Capability for each of these functions is typically measured in the number of bits that can be detected as erroneous and subsequently corrected. Detection capability can be the same or greater than the correction capability. A typical ECC can detect a higher number of error bits than it can correct. A collection of data bits and parity bits is sometimes called a word. An early example is the (7,4) Hamming code, which has the capability of detecting up to two errors per word (seven bits in this example) and has the capability of correcting one error in the seven-bit word.
More sophisticated ECCs can correct more than a single error per word, but it becomes computationally increasingly complex to reconstruct the data. Common practice is to recover the data with some acceptably small likelihood of incorrect recovery. However with increasing number of errors the probability of reliable data recovery also decreases rapidly or the associated costs in additional hardware and/or performance become prohibitively high.
In semiconductor memory devices, including EEPROM systems, data can be represented by the threshold voltages of transistors. Typically, different digital data storage values correspond to different voltage ranges. If, for some reason, during the read operation the voltage levels shift from their preferred ranges, an error occurs. The error may be detected by the ECC and in some cases these errors may be corrected.